What I've learned building an agent for Renovate config (as a cautious skeptic of AI) (11 mins read).

As an opportunity to "kick the tyres" of what agents are and how they work, I set aside a couple of hours to see build one - and it blew me away.
What I've learned building an agent for Renovate config (as a cautious skeptic of AI) (11 mins read).

As an opportunity to "kick the tyres" of what agents are and how they work, I set aside a couple of hours to see build one - and it blew me away.
Time for the annual predictions episode! Bryan and Adam were joined by frequent future-ologists Simon Willison, Steve Klabnik, and Ian Grunert to review past predictions and peer into the future. If any of these predictions come to fruition, it's going to be an interest 1, 3, or 6 years!In...

I'm sorry for what I said when I was overstimulated.
What do LLMs mean for the future of software engineering? Will vibe-coded AI slop be the norm? Will software engineers simply be less in-demand? Rain and David join Bryan and Adam to discuss how rigorous use of LLMs can make for much more robust systems.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam...

A day of national mourning is upon us - our kettle stopped working this afternoon so we've had a whole half day with no tea 💔 (cries in British)
Welcome back to Break, a Fallthrough aftershow! In this episode, Nick Gerace sticks around for Break. The panel compare audio engineering backgrounds, discuss AI-powered podcast workflows, and Nick...

The first 100 days as a Renovate maintainer: the shocking inside view of a popular Open Source project (18 mins read).

Lessons learned from the first 100 days as my role as a Renovate maintainer, and a sneak peek into how the project works behind the scenes.
Nick Gerace, Engineering Manager at System Initiative, joins Kris and Matt to explore what infrastructure management looks like beyond Terraform. Nick walks us through how System Initiative differs...

Mat Ryer is back and he brought his impromptu musical abilities with him! We discuss Rob Pike vs thankful AI, Microsoft's GitHub monopoly (and what it means for open source), and Tom Tunguz' 12 predictions for 2026: agent-first design, the rise of vector databases, and are we about to pay more for AI than people?!
Week Notes 26#03 (1 mins read).
What happened in the week of 2026-01-12?
If you funded a maintainer before they created their most successful package, you have a claim on it. The Law of Surprise is underutilized in open source.
SummaryIn this episode, the hosts meet with Christina Martinez, a developer experience engineer from Resend, who shares insights on her creative process and current projects. She shares her delight in building silly software and how she's using that to learn in her current role.TakeawaysChristina is the creative mind behind the Gen Z Babel plugin.She also developed the Swift commits tool.Taking existing tutorials and adding a creative twist can make them more fun.Continuous development is important at all parts of your career.LinksChristina Martinez: https://christinacodes.devSilly Software Club: https://sillysoftware.clubResend: https://resend.com/Gen Z slang Babel plugin: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cxvwz76vBus/ | https://github.com/christina-de-martinez/babel-plugin-glowup-vibesTaylor Swift themed commit linting tool: https://youtube.com/shorts/eOS5Q2I9LHM?si=LC8JVUKTkLgwKtDF | https://github.com/christina-de-martinez/swift-commitsCodeTV & Mux's Worst Video Player Competition: https://www.mux.com/blog/actual-worst-video-playerReact Miami: https://www.reactmiami.com/HostsOvercommitted: https://overcommitted.devBethany Janos: https://github.com/bethanyj28Brittany Ellich: https://brittanyellich.comEggyhead: https://github.com/eggyhead

Everybody thinks 'https://' stands for 'hypertext transfer protocol secure' but it actually stands for 'head to this place, sucka' followed by a colon and two laser sounds
GopherCon 2026 Early tickets until Jan 31! Get them while they last!Go 1.26 coming soonOfficial release notesInteractive release notes by Anton ZhiyanovInterview with Arthur VaverkoVenn.cityJob openingsArthur Vaverko on LinkedIn

We've announced 6 Moderate Security Advisories, which allow for possible remote code execution, when an attacker has access to a repository's default branch More info: https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/discussions/40403
Authoring Markdown externally and pasting the 'pretty' output into Slack (on Mac) (2 mins read).
How to use copy the rendered representation of Markdown into a rich-text form into Slack, on Mac.
Getting access to rich-text data from the clipboard (on Mac) (1 mins read).
How to retrieve rich-text output from the clipboard.
Welcome back to Break, a Fallthrough aftershow! In this episode, Matt gets real about how AI doomerism on social media got to him over the holidays and the mental reset that pulled him out of it. K...

New Year, New Nuance! In this episode, Kris and Matt discuss what they're looking forward to in 2026—Matt shares the exciting news that he's becoming a dad, and the duo explore the value of growth,...

Creating a TUI for keeping an eye on GitHub Rate Limits (1 mins read).

Sharing ghrl, a Terminal User Interface (TUI) for monitoring rate limits for GitHub Apps.
2025's podcasts in review (3 mins read).
What podcasts did I listen to in 2025?
Week Notes 26#02 (5 mins read).
What happened in the week of 2026-01-05?
Josh chats with Xe Iaso, the creator of Anubis the web AI firewall. We discuss how Anubis is tackling bots and scrapers. The discussion around the scrapers is fascinating and challenging, these things are everywhere and don't behave very nicely. There's also discussion about running a successful open source project. Xe has a lot of experience to share with us, you're going to learn something new with this one. The show notes and blog post for this episode can be found at
We're joined by Sid Sijbrandij, founder of GitLab who led the all-in-one coding platform all the way to IPO. In late 2022, Sid discovered that he had bone cancer. That started a journey he's been on ever since... a journey that he shares with us in great detail. Along the way, Sid continued founding companies including...
Why the Renovate project uses GitHub Discussions as our triage process (16 mins read).

A dive into what we've learned over 5 years of using GitHub Discussions as our space to triage user questions.
i love the beginning of the year because everyone starts blogging. and if you (yes you) were thinking about starting, this is your sign
As AI adoption accelerates across the software industry, engineering leaders are increasingly focused on a harder question: how to understand whether these tools are actually improving developer experience and organizational outcomes.In this year-end episode of the Engineering Enablement podcast,...

This week on #OpenSourceSecurity I chat with Jamie Tanna about updating open source dependencies. It's usually not as simple as "just update" and Jamie has a ton of real world experience in this working on Renovate https://opensourcesecurity.io/2025/2025-12-renovate-jamie/
Bryan and Adam reflect on Oxide and Friends in 2025--favorite moments, episodes, and images. Happy new year and see you in 2026!Your hosts are Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal.Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:RFD 576: Using LLMs at Oxide (hacker news comments)OxF:...

Week Notes 26#01 (3 mins read).
What happened in the week of 2025-12-29?
it's truly amazing what LLMs can achieve. we now know it's possible to produce an html5 parsing library with nothing but the full source code of an existing html5 parsing library, all the source code of all other open source libraries ever, a meticulously maintained and extremely comprehensive test suite written by somebody else, 5 different models, a megawatt-hour of energy, a swimming pool full of water, and a month of spare time of an extremely senior engineer
2025's Music In Review (1 mins read).
What music was I listening to in 2025?
Welcome back to Break, a Fallthrough aftershow! In this episode, the panel continues their conversation from Fallthrough #52.Enjoying the aftershow? Let us know on social media! If you prefer to wa...

We decided to do our own wrap up for the year. We've called it Stack Trace, and we pulled a bunch of stats from the first year of Fallthrough. In this episode, Kris, Matt, and Dylan talk through th...

Welcome back to Break, a Fallthrough aftershow! In this episode, the panel continues their conversation from Fallthrough #51.Enjoying the aftershow? Let us know on social media! If you prefer to wa...

There's a famous joke essay called Worse Is Better, which compares the New Jersey and the MIT ideologies. In this episode, Kris and Matt discuss these two different ideologies and how they show up ...

Jan 1: this is the year of new Me Jan 12: [eating shredded cheese directly from the bag] new years resolutions are a bourgeois construct for disciplining bodies into productive units for capital
Please don’t go to enormous indoor events when you’re incredibly ill with a flu-like thing. Not even in a mask. Fuck sake.
2025's Site In Review (7 mins read).

How did my site perform in 2025?
day one in mamdani’s new york
Week Notes 25#52 (2 mins read).
What happened in the week of 2025-12-22?